Top Ten Higher Education Research Institutions in the UK

List: Top Ten Higher Education Research Institutions in the UK

Date: December 2008

Source: RAE / Research Fortnight

Base: The Research Assessment Exercise sees every university in the UK submit a dossier of their best researchers' work in 67 disciplines on which they are graded and then ranked. The assessment is carried out by panels led by the top academics in the country. The number of star researchers each department and university has at the end dictates their research funding for the next five years. Research Fortnight then tallies the figures and creates a ranked table from the RAE results.

Notes: The London School of Economics (LSE) headed Oxford and Cambridge in this particular ranking which is focused on research ability (not teaching) in higher education research institutions. However, the university department which won top marks for the quality of its research was that of museum studies in the University of Leicester - where two-thirds of the research submitted was ranked world-class.

Rank / University	Quality Index
1. London School of Economics	60.31
2. University of Oxford	60.28
3. University of Cambridge	59.79
4. Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine	58.24
5. University College, London	55.79
6. University of Manchester	54.41
7. University of Warwick	53.43
8. University of York	53.04
9. University of Essex	52.91
10. University of Edinburgh	52.67